Privacy-focused changes are coming, but will take time, Facebook CEO says

Under a banner declaring “the future is private,” Zuckerberg opened the company’s annual F8 developer’s conference Tuesday by explaining that Facebook is shifting its efforts to focus on building more secure, private spaces for users to communicate. (Handout)

Amid repeated promises of increased privacy and security for users, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg candidly admits that moving towards a privacy-focused future on the social network will take time.

Under a banner declaring “the future is private,” Zuckerberg opened the company’s annual F8 developer’s conference Tuesday by explaining that Facebook is shifting its efforts to focus on building more secure, private spaces for users to communicate.

However, exact details of what privacy enhancing measures will be rolled out and when remain unclear.

“It’s going to take time. I’m sure we’re going to keep unearthing old issues for a while, so it may feel like we’re not making progress at first,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday, during his keynote speech.

“This isn’t just about building features. We need to change a lot of the different ways that we run this company today.”

The Facebook founder did unveil six new core principles that he says the company will use to build new infrastructure for a privacy-focused platform. Those principles include private interactions, encryption, reducing permanence, safety, interoperability, and secure data storage.

“Over the next few years, we are going to build more of our services based on those ideas,” he said.

Zuckerberg pointed towards the company’s success with implementing end-to-end encryption on its messaging service WhatsApp starting in 2014, noting that Facebook’s Messenger app will eventually make end-to-end encryption the default setting for all messages.

He also said the company is working closely with security experts, governments, and law enforcement agencies when exploring changes to the platform.

“This isn’t just about a few new features,” he said. “This is a big change in how we are building these products and how we run our company. It’s not going to happen overnight—and, to be clear, we don’t have all the answers for how this is going to work.”

Facebook has come under increased pressure to enhance privacy on the platform following years of data leaks and privacy mishaps.

Most recently, Canada’s federal privacy watchdog announced plans to take Facebook to court following an investigation into the platform’s privacy practices following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. More than 620,000 Canadians had their data improperly shared in the incident, which affected 87 million users worldwide.

The company is also facing up to US$5 million in fines from the Federal Trade Commission over privacy violations.

“I get that a lot of people don’t think that we’re serious about this,” Zuckerberg said, laughing during his F8 keynote.

“I know that we don’t have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly.”

One of the immediate changes that users will see in the new Facebook layout, announced Tuesday, is a focus on private groups. Users will now be able to find suggested groups more easily with a redesigned Groups tab, and the platform will push Groups higher up in users’ newsfeeds for better engagement.

Privacy changes will extend to Instagram as well. The company has been testing new features that hide “likes” from photos. While users will still be able to see how many likes their photo gets, the number won’t appear at the bottom of each post.

Facebook users can read a more detailed explanation of the company’s private-focused initiative on Mark Zuckerberg’s blog.